I propose to describe a remarkably durable imaginative tradition emerging from the work of some representative American writers between the early seventeenth and the early twentieth centuries. Over such a span of years any vital cultural or literary impetus must be expected to change form repeatedly and offer itself to us in various disguises suited to particular times and particular artists. But to a surprising degree the work in which I am interested maintains a close association with a group of images and ideas that first appears in John Winthrop's “A Modell of Christian Charity” (1630) and that continues to sustain the prose of the revolutionary period and the major artistic products of the nineteenth century.

The outlines of the ideas and images themselves are fairly simple to trace. In his speech to the Arbella emigrants, John Winthrop established the central importance, to the colonizing errand, of a communal bond that he understood in both traditional and radical forms. To endure in America the community must be “knit together” as a single body – an idea that was familiar to Winthrop's contemporaries from a number of sources. But the degree of loyalty required was not fundamentally contractual or political in nature; it had to be familial. The guiding analogy, or model, of American life for Winthrop was to be the family, embodied for him most dramatically (and typologically) in the figure of Eve, transported by selfless love for her spouse and children.